Posts tagged with Android

Can Microsoft still compete in the mobile arena? Windows Phone 7 might
be the company's last chance, as it's unlikely that Microsoft will ever
be able to catch up to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android if it
doesn't make a big splash now.

But if one report is accurate, Microsoft thinks it has what it takes to compete: a really big bank account.

By almost every reasonable measurement, Google's Android OS is giving Apple a reason to check the rear-view mirror. But for many developers, developing for Android is still somewhat unattractive because the common wisdom is that successful Android apps are likely to generate far less revenue than successful iPhone/iPad apps.

One of the possible reasons: paid Android apps are sold through Google Checkout, which Android critics argue offers a far less pleasant experience than the App Store purchasing experience offers iPhone and iPad owners.

Given all of drama over the recent tiff between Apple and Adobe, the
news that regulators in the United States are looking closely at Apple
shouldn't come as a surprise. Apple's behavior, legal or not, was bound
to attract the attention of antitrust regulators sooner or later.

While many Apple critics will welcome the news, I think Apple
supporters and detractors alike have good reason to send the same
message to the regulators: thanks, but no thanks.

Apple's iPhone may be known as The Jesus Phone, but Google's diversified approach to selling smartphones appears to be paying off. According to AdMob's March Mobile Metrics Report, Google's Android operating system is quickly picking up market share in the smartphone market.

Can the world's number one search company design and sell a mobile phone to consumers direct via the internet? With the launch of the Nexus One smartphone on January 5, 2010, Google set out to answer that question.

74 days later, we have a reasonable estimate of how many Nexus Ones Google has moved: 135,000. The hard part: answering that first question.

It's going to be the year of mobile...again. Sure, go ahead and yawn (or laugh). We've heard it all before, right? But smartphone adoption is through the roof, and cutting-edge technologies are gaining some real traction. So we caught up author and consultant Rank Mobile's Cindy Krum to help sort out some of mobile marketing's most recent acronyms, not to mention their viability.

The iPhone may have revolutionized the smartphone market, but as other competitors launch their own web friendly phones, Apple's Jesus phone is starting to have to fight for market dominance. And while other phones may not have seeped into consumer consciousness in the same way yet, that doesn't mean they wont.

According to Crowd Sicence's brand loyalty survey, 1/3 of Blackberry users are willing to switch to Google's Android operating system when they purchase a smarphone. But there's still the matter of whether Google's online stategy can compete with AT&T and other carriers' sales strengths.

Why is the iPhone so popular with developers? One word: money. The App Store is a developer's lottery ticket. All it takes is the right app at the right time and fortune can be yours.

The widely-publicized stories of developers who struck it rich with iPhone apps arguably did more for iPhone development in the early days than any developer-oriented sales pitch from Apple or Steve Jobs. It has been somewhat difficult, however, to find the same sort of stories about developers who struck it rich with Android apps.

When it comes to the desktop, Flash Player is one of the more dominant plugins. Adobe claims it's "the world's most pervasive software platform...reaching 99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops". There's just one problem: internet-enabled mobiles are where much of the internet's future growth is usage is expected to come from.

But Adobe is trying to make sure that Flash Player is as dominant on the mobile as it is on the desktop and is making lots of announcements about its Open Screen Project at the Adobe developer conference in Los Angeles today.

According to estimates in a recent report, around $200m in iPhone apps are sold each month in Apple's App Store. The same report pegged the amount of money generated by app sales in Google's Android Market at only $5m.

But one company that develops apps that are sold in both marketplaces, Larva Labs, suggests that the gap between the iPhone economy and the Android economy may be even greater.

The reason? Despite producing Android apps that are ranked well in the Android Market, that have been featured by Google and that sell for $4.99/each, the company only managed to make $62.39/day on average from Android app sales during the month of August. As Larva Labs' Matt Hall writes, "Very difficult to buy the summer home at this rate".

It may come as no surprise that more people download applications on the iPhone and iPod touch than on Google's Android phone, but on both services, people are making purchases based on services they've already tried for free.

Mobile ad network AdMob released its July survey results today. After surveying 1,117 mobile phone users, the company found that across platforms, free-to-paid upgrades are the most cited driver for mobile app purchases, helping to prove that the freemium model works. In mobile at least.